Presets – Updated Auto Fix Preset with Profiles

Hi everyone. A while back I released an Auto Enhance preset and, to my surprise, a lot of folks out there are just as lazy as me and it turned out to be pretty popular Honestly, it’s not really laziness. It’s just that I found myself making the same adjustments over and over again and the Auto Tone settings in Lightroom coupled with some of the Vibrance, Clarity and Vignetting settings that I always use made it a perfect candidate for an auto preset to apply in the Import dialog. Well, I’ve gone and updated the preset to include 1) The new camera profiles and, 2) Better edge darkening the with the Post-Crop Vignette sliders.

So here’s the deal. First, they’re only for Nikon and Canon. Next, the preset turns on the Auto Tone setting in Lightroom and it’s just like clicking on Auto at the top of the Develop module panels. However, it also includes some Clarity and Vibrance changes in addition to the edge darkening. That stuff stays the same for ALL of them. What does change is the camera profile that is applied, which is why there’s a bunch of Auto presets. They’re intended to be used as you’re importing your photos into Lightroom. If your particular shoot was a portrait session and you’re fond of the Nikon “Camera Portrait” profile then choose the “Auto Enhance – Portrait (Nikon)” preset. If you were on a landscape shoot then try the “Auto Enhance – Landscape (Nikon)” preset or even the vivid one. If you shot a portrait with a great landscape behind it, well, you’re outta luck Actually, it kind of relies on you at least knowing which profiles you’ve become fond of because you’ll need to decide which to apply on import. Remember, if you pick the wrong one you can always change it. And don’t forget, I’ve got a video from way back called “Applying Edits to Multiple Photos” that shows you how to change a bunch of photos all at once so it’s not that big of a deal to choose the wrong one to start. Thanks and I hope you like ‘em.

Matt is the Vice President of Photography for onOne Software and a Tampa-based photographer. He's a best selling author of over 20 books and teaches Lightroom and Photoshop at seminars and conferences around the world.

What’s different between the different presets? (Neutral, landscape, portrait, etc.) Sometimes they look a little different but as far as I can tell the numbers each applies to the same photographs are identical.

Thanks, Matt. I chose the Canon Landscape preset and adjusted it a bit by increasing the detail setting and reducing the post-crop amount. From there it is just a matter of tweaking to get some of the best results I have ever had. Of course a new Canon 18-200 lens may have something to do with it as well.

To change the subject to HDR, I often photograph boats in harbor, which means that the wind can cause movement between shots. If the movement isn’t too severe I have sometimes had success by sending the images over to Photoshop as layers and then using auto-align. From there I use scripts to export the layers as files. It nothing I would want to do routinely but it has saved the day on images that were highly ghosted in Photomatix.

How do these Auto Enhance presents compare or how are they used versus some of your other presets – for example, the Canon Camera Profile presets and your Auto Adjustment (Portraits/Everything Else) presets?

Hi Matt, great work again. I was wondering if you can change the default camera raw setting when importing raw files. I shoot allot of low light stuff and it always puts the black point to 5 and curve adjustment. I made a preset but it would be nice if I could change it.

Cool Matt, and no, it’s defiantly not laziness. I think good auto presets are are the best way to start an editing workflow. I’ve played a lot with LR’s auto settings and using it in presets myself. I think LR2 has them a little better than LR1 did.

My biggest complaint is that it is seems Auto Tone sometimes overexposes. Maybe Adobe could set up the camera profiles so we could have it auto detect the camera and apply the correct profile. Then it could be made separate from our auto presets and we wound barely have to think about it.